Recently most major cities have announced dramatic cuts to public transportation, public education, and emergency services. Over the last ten years, we have watched hundreds of thousands of hard working Americans get laid-off and replaced either by a computer or a person willing to work for pennies. We have assisted global mega-corporations in killing small businesses and exploiting poor people across the globe. Technology has made everything cheaper, easier, and faster; but has it made human beings less useful? Are we innovating ourselves towards the Apocalypse?
For all my readers who have never read the bible, the Revelation of John describes the end of the world in dramatic fashion. I’m pretty sure what was written was meant to be taken metaphorically, however, if it is to be taken literally, we can expect the third Lord of the Rings movie to be outside our bedroom windows. In short, war and famine on a massive scale ultimately killing us all.
In the film Idiocracy, an average man and woman were teleported 500 years in the future. In this rendition of the future, people with lower IQ’s have continued to have a multitude of offspring, while people with higher IQ’s had few to no children (literally breeding themselves out of existence.) The meek truly inherited the earth.
In this future everyone is constantly exposed to advertisements, mindless television, and automated everything. A running joke in the film is that drinking water no longer exist because everyone drinks a Gatorade-like-drink because it has electrolytes, even though no one actually knows what an electrolyte is. All the plants have died in this future because they used this Gatorade to “water” the plants because “it has electrolytes.”
The movie is pretty funny but the reality of this future is all too possible. Think about the changes in culture since the ’80’s. Do you remember life before smart phones, dollar menus, video games, and get slim quick commercials?
The perfect storm. Every year pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars from “treating” preventable diseases. Many of today’s killer diseases are due to inactivity combined with poor diet. Children are learning less from their ailing grandparents and parents. Family culture, history, and home remedies are dying. They are being taught by the television, the computer and the radio. The shows, music videos, and games that we “adults” find entertaining are being absorbed as instructions manuals on how to behave by the younger generation. Since our generation and the generation before us were/are too busy or too sick to spend quality time with our children, they have become accustomed to isolation and are unaffected by authority figures. The new and next generation will be desensitized to violence, materialistically motivated, and adverse to human interaction. Sounds like the resume’ for a serial killer for higher.
In the near future, the poor will have less access to education and work. Anyone from a third world country can attest that poor uneducated people with no access to work is a recipe for revolution and chaos. Everyday in the news, we hear about these “thugs in the hood” shooting each other over the pettiest of things. We imagine that these people are not human but would you behave differently if faced with the same hardships?
Do you feel confident that your job, company or profession will exist in the next 20 years? If the American economy completely shut down would you be able to survive? Do you know any “smart” people with more than 2 children? Do you find yourself using automated services over interacting with a person? Do you look at the younger generation like they’re aliens from another planet?
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on Jun 8th, 2010 at 11:55 am
Hopefully more adults will have the same epiphany. Children are already overly stimulated. It disheartning to hear children claiming to be bored when they have gaming systems that do more than computers did 20 years ago, over 20 channels of age appropriate television shows, countless dvd’s, and the list goes on. I have met children who have never played a board game, much less a game like tic-tac-toe. I have to admit that I would rather go to the library than play outside growing up (until I hit puberty and realized that all the cute guys were at the park playing basketball), some children don’t know how to just “play” with each other, whether it is due to lack of imagination, lack of physical prowess or just plain lack of social skills…but something has to change. Hopefully, you’ll have another revelation…but with a solution this time!
on Jun 8th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
My job (budding attorney) will probably exist in another 20 years, just on the mere fact that people will always have disputes. I think the reason that “smart” people may not have over two children alot of the times is that they tend to get married and start families later on in life because they spend so many years in school. For instance, doctors spend 8 years in med school, so they are looking at starting families in their early 30s, and women with their biological clock ticking will probably not want to have children post 35. In terms of using automated services, I dont know if that is the hugest issue. Jobs change with technology, however, just because certain jobs are becoming obsolete doesnt mean that there are less jobs–just different ones. For instance, blockbuster is slowly getting pushed out of the market, but it has been replaced by netflix and the movie stand carts in grocery stores. One of the biggest challenges with technology however, is that people do lack face to face communication on the reliance of various modes of communication. People do not know how to communicate with each other now-a-days consequently, personal and professional relationships with suffer as a result. (sorry for the length)